481–490 of 592 posts
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> This removes most common use cases like wallets, remotes, etc. I use an airtag for my wallet and apple remote. https://ridge.com/products/carbon-case-for-airtag https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09G4PT3NJ
For 10 USD more than the carbon case, I prefer using the following item for my wallet. https://nomadgoods.com/products/tracking-card
Plus one less card space in it, even if it did work.
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Apple sold the first widely-available computer with USB connections, the iMac G3. > To replace the removed ports, the iMac has Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, which were faster and cheaper than Apple Desktop Bus and serial ports but were very new—the standard was not finalized until after the iMac's release—and unsupported by any third-party Mac peripheral. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3#Design It would no…
> Apple sold the first widely-available computer with USB connections, the iMac G3. They were also, simultaneously, the first manufacturer to really go all-in on USB. Some PC manufacturers at the time were including one or two USB ports on their systems, but relied on legacy ports (PS/2, serial, parallel, etc) for most functionality. Their USB ports were mostly a show of "look, we have the new thing" - much in the sa…
The all-in approach required a forklift upgrade and generated a ton of e-waste.
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It's exactly how Apple operates. The last Apple device with Firewire was produced in 2012, though it was sold for several more years. MacOS 13 (2022) dropped the Firewire CoreAudio driver (as well as other, more niche support for Firewire). So... exactly 10 years. If you're going to put me in a bucket, I'd be in the "Apple Hater" bucket, but I honestly think that the way that they do this is fine. It would have been…
You’re right Apple has a playbook of changing port types every few years, but there are adaptors available. The devices themselves still work, just that Apple knows they can use this one trick to encourage some customers to upgrade. With wireless devices, protocol changes would brick the device, so they’d be less likely to do it so quickly. As far as I know, Apple haven’t announced any plans to deprecate the original…
What is the point of CNC machined screws? I have only seen that type of thing on specialized military applications and the like. I'm sure standard rolled screws would be just fine...
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European countries sometimes have a rather repulsive legal system that provides far too much protection to perpetrators.
There is no concept in American Law of "acquiring stolen stuff legally". If you buy something that was stolen, the original owner has the right to get it back without compensation to you.
The third time someone calls to complain that the alkaline batteries they put in this leaked, they'll wish they used a soldered-in 3V lithium primary cell. Even though that goes against a certain ethos.
The lithium AA/AAA/CR batteries don't seem to leak. They're not widely available though. I use them for devices which mostly sit in a drawer and their lifetime can reach 5-6 years.
The size and cost of this unit and the AirTag to put in it get close, but not quite to, the size and cost of a cellular asset tracker. Roughly $30 more to get into a reputable brand asset tracker. The promised ten-year life is better than the e.g. 4-year life you can get out of a GPS/LTE NB-IOT with lithium primary cell and deep sleep, and with fewer compromises around tesponsiveness to commands (primary-battery asse…
Nice solution, but the bigger problem is how AirTags can basically be turned off, which makes it poor for many use cases. Of course, I get it from Apple's perspective, they dont want AirTags to be used to tail others. However, that precludes it from being used for theft tracking. For example, I use an AirTag on my bicycle. If someone steals the bicycle, they are literally informed "an air tag is following you" https:…
Theft-tracking is sort of an "off-label" use for AirTags, from Apple's perspective. They'd rather make AirTags less generally useful than make them both more generally useful + open to stalking occurrences and lawsuits.
If you could disable the public key rotation on the AirTag, presumably you could greatly extend its battery life at the cost of your own privacy. When your battery gets low, Apple warns that "privacy protection is temporarily adjusted, AirTag may be traceable over Bluetooth". Wish I could enable this behavior in certain situations to extend the life. (Or hook up an oversized external battery like this one, but tune t…
I doubt that key rotation is a significant contributor to energy use. Energy spent doing RF (transmitting) plus energy spent sleeping will account for over 90 % of the energy use. Source: I'm in a similar industry